Once the poster child for recovery, one Portland prostitute still struggles to escape a life of sex, drugs and potential violence

Everybody who knows Denise Warren agrees that she wants to change her life.

When she's sober, Warren is articulate, self-aware and as warm-hearted as they come. She devours mystery novels, adores her children and talks with passion about wanting to help other women avoid the mistakes she's made.

Yet she keeps making mistakes. So she's stuck in legal limbo, the type that had a prosecutor and a public defender practically yelling at each other this week and a judge throwing up her hands in frustration.

Denise Warren not long after I met her.

I first met Warren almost three years ago during a ride-along with members of an East Precinct vice team formed to fight crime along 82nd Avenue after Mayor Tom Potter decided to end Portland's drug- and prostitution-free zones. Warren was working the street in a tight purple dress when officers stopped her, telling me I needed to interview her to understand what they were fighting -- women for whom the prospect of arrest was nowhere as frightening as the prospect of a day without drugs.

When I ran into her again 1 1/2 years later, Warren had just testified at City Hall in favor of public funding to support a new alternative sentencing program for hookers. Warren was one of the first women in the initiative: Arrested months earlier, she agreed to participate in intense drug rehab and counseling. In exchange, she got probation rather than jail time, and a nonprofit found her housing. She attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings and saw a therapist. All that helped Warren understand that she's addicted not just to drugs but also to attention -- even the unhealthy kind. She was sexually abused as a child and has severe self-esteem issues.

View full sizeWarren after entering a drug treatment program and getting off the street.

"I know that I cannot expect it all to happen overnight, but I also know I'm on the way," she said.

That was February 2010. She managed normalcy for a while; she bought a laptop and paid for her middle-school-aged son's football camp. Yet soon, frustrated because she couldn't find a job and felt fat, she asked a friend to help her buy heroin. "It took me about a month from starting to use again to go back to looking for dates," she said. "I'm an addict. Once I start, I don't stop."

Police arrested her again on 82nd. Last fall, a judge sentenced her to almost a year in jail with an option for early release if she agreed to in-patient drug rehab. When I visited her at Inverness Jail in December, she had scratches up and down her arms from a work detail and talked her usual mile a minute. She also seemed emotionally lighter and more determined.

Warren's booking photo from her most recent arrest, last fall.

"Jail is the best place for me right now," she said. "In here, I can't talk to the people who are no good for me and I have to get clean."

Warren, 37, was supposed to find out where she'll do her in-treatment work in January, but the hearing was postponed. She was scheduled to appear before Judge Judith Matarazzo Monday, but that, too, was pushed back.

At some point, jail will stop being the best place for Warren. We might be there already. She spent three weeks in solitary confinement earlier this winter after fighting with another inmate. (She says she was attacked.) She's reading books on the 12-step process, and last month received a visit from her 19-year-old daughter, from whom she's been estranged since dropping the girl and her brother at their grandmother's house to go turn tricks in 2003. But in letters she writes me, Warren sounds bored and anxious, dangerous states for a recovering addict.

"I just want to know if she's on any waiting lists," Matarazzo said in court Monday. "I believe this woman is serious about wanting something different. I don't want her sitting there and at some point going, 'I'm done.'"

Defense lawyer Alan Norris told Matarazzo he thinks social workers have purposely procrastinated: "They waited 2 1/2 months before they even started looking for a place to put her," he said, his voice rising "I believe they have not just dropped the ball, but maliciously dropped the ball."

JR Ujifusa, a deputy district attorney, raised his voice right back, saying counselors with the nonprofit LifeWorks NW have put Warren on the waiting list at as many as 10 clinics. But there is not enough space for everyone who needs help and can't pay for it themselves.

Oregon has 502 publicly funded drug-treatment beds, and more than 800 people on the waiting list. The average wait time is two to four months, said Karen Wheeler, addiction programs administrator for the Oregon Department of Human Services.

Warren's options are limited by her crimes: Prosecutors want her outside Portland, away from old friends who might help her get drugs. They also want her in a place that admits only women, a caveat that prompted Norris to slap the table in frustration this week. "Do you think prostitutes do this for their pleasure?" he asked.

No, but Ujifusa has known Warren a long time. He met her six years ago when he was just a DA intern.

"When I've talked to Denise when she's well, she says, 'When I get my addiction under control, everything will be fine,'" he said in an interview. "But even when she was clean, Denise would say, 'I have to stop by the police station every now and then just to check in.' She knew that structure would help her."

The challenge: At some point, Warren must make it on her own.

"I'm ready," she wrote me last week. "The future holds hope."

I am not entirely optimistic; the safety net for someone in Warren's situation -- someone for whom poverty and addiction led to a life of crime -- had gaping holes even before the recession. State budget cuts will widen the gaps.

But like all those who've watched her struggle, a list topped by the officers who arrested her and the prosecutor who convicted her, I hope and pray that this time she makes it out for good. As Warren knows, she has no long-term alternative.

"There's a reason you don't see a lot of old hos," she said in December. "Girls either get out, or they die."